Do Not Open
by Zipper Whippersnapper
Summary: "He's seen a lot of things. He's heard of a lot of things. Things that you wouldn't believe." Lamont character study.


He's seen a lot of things. He's heard of a lot of things.

Things that you wouldn't believe.

He'd be lying if he said that he hasn't been involved in some strange stuff over the years; not many people in their right minds try to get their hands on holy relics, mermaid's hair, hemlock, or human blood on a regular basis, and he knows by now – from experience, not that you really want to know much more than that – that not many normal people are interested in selling them, either. No, in order to get what his clients desire he's had to go to some pretty odd places, meet some pretty odd people, and learn some pretty odd facts. It's all paid off, in the end, and it's the main reason – or one of them, really – for why he is where he is now. It's just another aspect of the job to him, like his car or the cardboard boxes that always fill the back of it, like bills and rent and all the little mundane things that make up his otherwise unusual life. It's something that he's gotten used to, sometimes to the point that he comes to think of it as just another job – UPS, with a dash of resource allocation and accounting thrown in. He's just an entrepreneur, getting people what they want when they want it; he connects buyers with sellers and makes money – _lots_ of money – in the process. An ordinary job; it has some pretty strange hours, but it's not that much different than what anyone else does for a living.

Later, as he wraps a kidney – a _human_ kidney. What the hell is Worth up to now? – in plastic and carefully, oh-so-carefully places it in an innocuous-looking cardboard box, he wonders what he was thinking when he compared this job to the postal service. The last time he checked, people didn't mail body parts to one another.

Sometimes, when he's had a few too many drinks, he wonders how someone like him – Lamont Toucey, the soft-spoken little Italian kid, unusually polite even then, the favorite of all the mothers in the neighborhood – managed to land himself a job like this. Worth likes to joke that it's because he's Italian, as if he's the Mafioso of vampires, werewolves, and ghosts and this is as much genetics as his greasy hair and stocky build. A well-aimed punch to the jaw is usually enough to shut the doctor up, but it's been said and he wonders about it sometimes. It certainly explains a lot, if you overlook the blatant stereotyping involved.

In the end, though, it doesn't really matter what he does or why he does it; he sleeps easy and his conscience is, for the most part, unscathed. Yes, some of what he does is illegal, but money is money – Lamont isn't one to worry about the morality of his work, much less discuss it with his clients. What troubles him at night isn't metaphysics, but logistics: getting box A to point B, contacting person X so he can procure box Y, organizing his invoices so he can go about the entire business without losing track of the products and wasting time trying to find that unpaid bill or unsigned delivery form. He's learned from experience that the world he delves into on a daily basis isn't focused on good and bad – not as much as it used to be, anyway –but on expenditure and income, input and output. It's a world of ancient rules and reciprocity, one where a favor or good word can make or break deals that last for years, sometimes lifetimes. It's a philosophy that he can't find fault with, as callous and capitalistic – not to mention insane. Selling rock albums to nøkken_, really? – _as it may sound. He just wants to be able to live a good life.

Sometimes, though, things happen that can't be written off as "just good business;" he'd be lying if he said that he hasn't been legitimately scared of his job and what it leads to at times. The supernatural world isn't blessed with clear-cut boundaries the way that people like to assume it is and he's unknowingly crossed the line between "paranormal" and "occult" more than once – when that happens, the consequences are usually dire and he has to pull more than a few strings to keep himself from simply vanishing off the face of the earth. He knows people, he's heard of people that can do strange things, sometimes good things but also terrible things if you make the mistake of crossing them. Sometimes he can say that he's friends – or at least acquaintances - with them, and other times he can't. It's the times that he can't that scare him, though he'd never flat-out tell anyone.

Some boxes just aren't meant to be opened; he can tell by their outsides, the stains visible through the cardboard as things that he tries not to think too hard about sit patiently in the back of his car, waiting, worth much more than they appear, sometimes glowing with eerie lights or burning holes in their boxes and his upholstery if he lets them sit for too long.

It's just business.


End file.
